private cloud
Hybrid Gets Real: Blending Private and Public Clouds
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BuzzBy the CloudSwitch Team
Over the past year we've had the pleasure of working with Terremark as a partner, as we jointly engage with enterprise customers who want to leverage hybrid clouds. For these customers and prospects, hybrid means the flexibility to combine their traditional data centers, new private clouds and managed service/colo environments with public clouds such as Terremark's Enterprise Cloud. Please join us tomorrow, March 3rd from 1:00-2:00pm EST to learn about hybrid clouds based on our hands-on experiences with enterprise customers who are using Terremark for a full range of cloud services.
CloudSwitch Enables True Cloud Federation
By Pavan Pant
As with any transformative technology that is new to the market, both public and private clouds have generated massive amounts of hype, bold predictions, a whole lot of confusion and raging debates amongst the cloud cognoscenti. Opinions vary across the spectrum with some experts claiming that data centers will be rendered obsolete by the public cloud, while others are dismissive of the public cloud but support private clouds. It’s clear to us at CloudSwitch that a more likely scenario lies squarely in the middle of those two extremes. This week at VMworld (where we were exhibiting with our partner, Terremark), we were pleased to hear that VMware believes that “hybrid cloud is the tide coming in.” From Paul Maritz’s keynote through many sessions and product announcements (including the release of the long-awaited vCloud Director), the message was all about hybrid clouds.
One of our previous blog posts discussed the notion of hybrid clouds and the fact that most enterprises will follow such an approach in the future. Amazon, Terremark, Rackspace, Savvis, Blue Lock and other public cloud providers give customers elasticity, better service delivery and low CapEx costs. Meanwhile, there are solutions such as Eucalyptus and VMware’s vCloud Director that provide the interface and management tools to help organizations build private clouds while interfacing with public clouds to create hybrid cloud models.
Both use different APIs for their hybrid models with Eucalyptus delivering tight integrations for EC2 using Amazon’s APIs and VMware vCloud Director working with vCloud DataCenter Services (VMware’s terminology for public cloud providers) such as Terremark that leverage vCloud APIs. However, these technologies do not assist with creating an environment that spans hypervisors and cloud providers without changing the applications. If customers build private clouds that are not using the same virtualization infrastructure as their preferred public clouds then what does it really mean to hybridize their clouds?
Consider a scenario where a customer builds a private cloud using Eucalyptus or VMware vCloud Director. That private cloud still ends up being different from your data center (much like a public cloud) - the networking may be different, versions of virtualization technology may be different and the storage infrastructure may be different. All this means that applications in the data center will need to be changed before moving to the private cloud. As an example, if your QA team runs servers on their own subnet in the data center how can this be transitioned to a private or public cloud without incurring additional costs to change those servers?
CloudSwitch’s core value proposition lies in the ability to securely transport a customer’s existing virtual infrastructure to the cloud provider of their choice, independent of the provider’s underlying virtualization infrastructure (VMware, Xen, etc.). This effectively allows customers to securely move and operate servers from their data center across hypervisors to private cloud providers without requiring them to make any modifications to their application – we maintain the same IP address, MAC address, storage controllers, subnet information, etc. Once customers have moved their servers to the cloud they can operate and manage them just as they would in their data center. CloudSwitch has an intuitive web based interface which gives customers server lifecycle management options such as start, stop and clone.
Similarly, if customers have a private cloud which uses either Eucalyptus or VMware vCloud Director CloudSwitch can speak to those APIs and facilitate the transfer and management from these private clouds to public clouds. This enables a hybrid model where private clouds leverage public clouds for spikes in usage (cloudburst), or lab-on-demand use cases for training and POCs. CloudSwitch does all the work of integrating the environments across these private and public cloud hypervisors, merging networks and transferring servers without modifying them in any way.
Many years ago, I had the privilege to work on the first iterations of RSA’s identity federation product both as an engineer and as a product manager. Federated single sign on enabled the portability of identities across security domains and allowed for the secure exchange of sensitive data outside the firewall without requiring any changes to the identity itself.
While the markets for Identity Management and cloud computing are unambiguously different, the notion of federation to make portability and interoperability easier for enterprises is a common theme. CloudSwitch is in a unique position to help enterprises with true cloud federation by moving workloads seamlessly from the data center to the cloud (private or public), between private and public clouds (hybrid), across public clouds and back to the data center without requiring customers to make any changes to their applications. Regardless of the starting point, CloudSwitch offers customers an easy, effective method to leverage the benefits of the cloud while ensuring portability across clouds.
Private Clouds: Old Wine in a New Bottle
By John McEleney
I recently read a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report about cloud computing, and they described private clouds as "old wine in a new bottle." I think they nailed it!
The report points out that a typical private cloud set-up looks much the same as the infrastructure components currently found in a corporate data center, with virtualization added to the mix. While the virtualization provides somewhat better server utilization, the elasticity and efficiency available in the public cloud has private clouds beat by a mile.
In short, the term "private cloud" is usually just a buzzword for virtualized internal environments that have been around for years. By replicating existing data center architectures, they also recreate the same cost and maintenance issues that cloud computing aims to alleviate.
Despite their limitations, there is still a lot of industry talk about creating internal private clouds using equipment running inside a company’s data center. So why do people consider building private clouds anyway?
To answer this question, you have to step back and examine some of the fundamental reasons why people are looking to cloud computing:
- The current infrastructure is not flexible enough to meet business needs
- Users of IT services have to wait too long to get access to additional computing resources
- CFOs and CIOs are tightening budgets, and they prefer operational expenses (tied directly to business performance) vs. capital expenses (allocated to business units)
In every case, the public cloud option outperforms the private cloud. Let’s examine each point:
- Flexibility – the ability to access essentially unlimited computing resources as you need them provides the ultimate level of flexibility. The scale of a public cloud like Amazon’s EC2 cannot possibly be replicated by a single enterprise. And that’s just one cloud – there are many others, allowing you to choose a range of providers according to your needs.
- Timeframes – to gain immediate access to public cloud compute resources, you only need an active account (and of course the appropriate corporate credentials). With a private cloud, users have to wait until the IT department completes the build out of the private cloud infrastructure. They are essentially subject to the same procurement and deployment challenges that had them looking at the public cloud in the first place.
- Budgets – everyone knows that the economic environment has brought a new level of scrutiny on expenses. In particular, capital budgets have been slashed. Approving millions of dollars (at least) to acquire, maintain and scale a private cloud sufficient for enterprise needs is becoming harder and harder to justify — especially when the "pay as you go" approach of public clouds is much more cost-effective.
There are many legitimate concerns that people have with the public cloud, including security, application migration and vendor lock-in. It is for these reasons and more that we created CloudSwitch. We’ve eliminated these previous barriers, so enterprises can take immediate advantage of the elasticity and economies of scale available in multi-tenant public clouds. Our technology is available now, and combines end-to-end security with point-and-click simplicity to revolutionize the way organizations deploy and manage their applications in public clouds.
Sir Isaac Newton may not have dreamed about clouds, but his first Law of Motion, "a body at rest tends to stay at rest", has been a good harbinger of cloud adoption until now. It is fair to expect that people will grasp for private clouds simply because it’s more comfortable (it’s the status quo). However, the rationale for public cloud adoption is so compelling that a majority of organizations will choose to embrace the likes of Amazon, Terremark, and other clouds. As adoption increases, private clouds will be used only for select applications, thus requiring far fewer resources than they currently demand. We’re also seeing the emergence of “hybrid” clouds that allow customers to toggle compute workloads between private and public clouds on an as-needed basis.
In the end, we will have new wine and it will be in a new bottle. With CloudSwitch technology, 2010 is shaping up to be a great vintage.
